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By Root 464 0

from Mezze to Mount Qassioun, the heights overlooking Damascus, I tried to make small talk with the drivers in Arabic about the cold and rainy weather that winter. Both acknowledged with a glance that I was talking to them, but they said nothing, their faces stern. Halfway up the hill, along a right-hand bend in a thicket of willow trees, the car veered off the highway onto an old country road whose passage was obscured by dangling branches. Men with machine guns appeared among the trees at both sides of the car as we approached an iron gate. A guard with features nearly identical to my escort’s looked at the driver’s face, then glanced at mine. Without saying a word, he motioned with one hand, and the gate in front of us swung open. Fifty meters ahead was a small dacha with a classical facade. The car pulled up to the building’s front door. Another guard, looking identical to the first, opened the car door. “Up the stairs to your left, sir,” he said.

This wasn’t my first meeting with a head of state or his wife in the Arab world, so I had a good idea what to expect. This usually involved waiting, sometimes for hours, in an antechamber while staff served strong cups of Arabic coffee or tea. Sometimes the VIP’s aides would try and spin stories as well. Once, while waiting to meet the Palestinian president Yasir Arafat in Gaza, for example, one of his staff tried to convince me that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish plot to undermine the peace process.

As I entered the room, I saw Asma al-Assad sitting behind her desk, quietly writing. I was shocked—no one had asked me for my ID or searched my bag. She glanced up, put down her pen, and greeted me with a tender handshake and smile. It was clear why she had caught the president’s eye: standing about five foot eight with bobbed blond hair and friendly eyes and in good shape, Mrs. Assad was a vision of refined Levantine beauty.

I also soon understood why he had married her. In a place where few things were as they seemed, she was surprisingly open and genuine, telling me all about her life within the first hour of our discussion. Asma was born in London in 1975 to Fawaz Akhras, a well-regarded cardiologist who hailed from a prominent Sunni family from the Syrian city of Homs, and his wife, Sahar, a former first secretary in the Syrian embassy in London. After a public-school education in Britain, Asma entered King’s College, University of London, earning high marks and graduating with a first-class-honors bachelor of science degree in computer science and a diploma in French literature. The following year, she started work at Deutsche Bank as an analyst in a hedge fund. In 1998, she joined J.P. Morgan’s London office, where she became an investment banker specializing in mergers and acquisitions for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.6

The reasons for her next step she didn’t explain. After three seemingly successful years in the world of finance, Asma returned to Syria and married Bashar al-Assad. The marriage raised eyebrows in Syria for one particular reason: Asma was Sunni, and Bashar was Alawite.

No photographs of the wedding appeared in local newspapers, which some Syrians told me was a sign of the Assad family’s displeasure with the president’s choice. Asma told me that the secrecy surrounding her wedding allowed her to get to know her homeland better. So while the British press speculated that the president’s wife was now living the life of luxury, Asma instead made an incognito journey around Syria. She said she wanted to talk to and meet Syrians openly, not as the wife of the president. She said she needed to talk to people in a normal environment to listen to and understand their problems. She said she visited around one hundred villages in all but one of Syria’s fourteen governorates. Since Israel occupied the Golan, that probably meant all Syrian territory under the regime’s control.

Asma said, “Villagers are very pure, very willing. Young people don’t want to leave their villages, but economic opportunities don’t exist there.” While this seemed